Waste of the Day: California Didn’t Track Effects Of $24 Billion Homelessness Spending

Topline: California spent $24 billion in the past five years to address its homelessness crisis, but no one is sure if the huge investment had any impact.

How much did California spend on homelessness?

Key facts: A new state audit found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness stopped tracking whether its programs were working in June 2021 and has no consistent way of measuring the outcomes of its spending.

Only two of the five programs analyzed in the audit are “likely cost-effective.” The other three have not collected enough data to prove that their initiatives are useful.

Auditors warned in February 2021 that the lack of data could “hamper the effectiveness of the State’s efforts to end homelessness.”

In September 2021, the state legislature ordered the California Interagency Council on Homelessness to make its financial data publicly available, but lawmakers never specified how often that should happen. The Council has only reported its data once since then.

Until new data is released, “the State and its policymakers are likely to struggle to understand homelessness programs’ ongoing costs and achieved outcomes,” auditors wrote.

Auditors said the data that does exist may be inaccurate. The Council runs several homelessness programs, and many of them are not required to report all of their spending to the state.

WELL!?

There’s also no consistent method for reporting results, making it difficult to compare programs that use different metrics.

The audit praised the efficiency of a $3.6 billion program that turns hotel rooms into affordable housing and another program that gives families up to $22,000 to stop them from losing their homes.

There are over 181,000 homeless people in California, 28% of the total U.S. homeless population. That’s up from 118,000 in 2013.

Critical quote: State Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher laid the blame on California’s governor.

“This is standard Gavin Newsom – make a splashy announcement, waste a bunch of taxpayer money, and completely fail to deliver,” Gallagher told Fox News. “Californians are tired of the homeless crisis, and they’re even more tired of Gavin’s excuses. We need results – period, full stop.”

Supporting quote: Auditors blamed the Council for not tracking the state’s homelessness services, but a spokesperson for Newsom told Fox News that it’s local governments who “are primarily responsible for implementing these programs and collecting data on outcomes that the state can use to evaluate program effectiveness.”

Summary: It will take a huge investment to fight California’s homelessness crisis, but it’s equally important that the money is spent efficiently.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.